ARMORING BECOMES CHRONIC

[ Introduction ] [ Energy Movement ] [ How We Got There ] [ Fight or Flight ] [ More Contact ] [ Incipient Armoring ] [ Chronic Armoring ] [ Tools of Therapy ] [ Therapeutic Process ] [ Acting Out ] [ Concluding Remarks ]

While some degree of armoring is necessary for any person to function in the world, it is when the armor becomes rigid and the individual loses the flexibility to take off the armor when it is no longer needed that problems occur.  It is then we say the person no longer has armor, the armor has him.

This process can be greatly accelerated when the growing individual is either denied the opportunity to engage in loving, sexual relationships (whether due to external or internal prohibitions is not the issue here).  If in spite of prohibitions the person still manages to establish a relationship, it can become so overladen with secondary drives, guilt, sadism, etc., that the energy economy of the individual remains blocked enough to give rise to neurotic symptoms.

To the degree that the individual retains contact with his core and primary feelings, the less this armoring process can take hold and anchor itself in the individual.

In those cases where it does, the adolescent and young adult can begin to develop chronic emotional attitudes.  This character armoring is seen as an outgrowth of a number of dynamic factors in the person's life, including its genetic make-up, its own unique temperament as well as its environment.  Specific attitudes (to name just a few) would include spitefulness, a what's-the-use attitude, a strong tendency to demean oneself, haughtiness, being overly compliant or always doing for others.  Chronic character attitudes function as a compromise solution to the person's internal conflicts between their drives and the repressing forces, both external and internal.  Repression serves to alleviate the person  to some degree of the anxiety presented by these painful conflicts.

With time these characterological attitudes and muscular holding patterns become chronic, lending a rigidity to the personality style of the person as well as decreased emotional liveliness and expressivity.  Overall a general chronic sympatheticonia prevails in the organism.

This chronic contraction of the musculature acts as a dynamic reservoir to continue to immobilize the energy and keep the energetic level of the organism low.